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MUSIC; Prokofiev and the Might-Have-Beens

ALTHOUGH the Metropolitan Opera performance of Sergei Prokofiev's ''Gambler'' under the indefatigable baton of Valery Gergiev tomorrow evening is billed as a Met premiere, New York operagoers with longish memories may recall an earlier production of the work on that prestigious stage. Back in July 1975, it was one of the featured novelties in the Bolshoi Theater's now legendary guest season, dazzlingly staged by Boris Pokrovsky on a set designed by Valery Leventhal, which plotted the whole action on a gigantic metaphorical roulette wheel that seasickeningly revolved at crucial moments.

Alexander Lazarev, later the Bolshoi's chief conductor and now leading the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted forcefully; and at least one member of the cast, the wild-eyed character tenor Aleksei Maslennikov in the lead role of his namesake, Aleksei, made what must have been an unforgettable impression (since I still remember it so vividly after a quarter-century). The composer of ''Peter and the Wolf,'' it appeared, had started life as a card-carrying Expressionist. His maiden opera's return to the Met stage gives audiences another chance to ponder what Prokofiev might have achieved in the theater had there been no Russian Revolution, no years of wandering, no prodigal's return, no Stalinist horror.

And this production, too, though the orchestra will be the Met's, is basically a Russian one. Four of the principals -- Sergei Aleksashkin (the General), Vladimir Galouzine (Aleksei), Elena Obraztsova (Babulenka) and Nikolai Gassiyev (Marquis de Grieux) -- are repeating the roles they recorded under Mr. Gergiev in 1996 for Philips as members of his own company, the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. The other major roles, too, with the single exception of John Fanning as Mr. Astley, will also be sung by natives, a great advantage in an opera that sets such store by idiomatic declamation. Mr. Gergiev's permanent affiliation with the Met, as principal guest conductor, is paying a dividend.

Will ''The Gambler'' finally become a repertory opera in the 21st century? Or will it now look like a period piece? It certainly was an authentic manifestation of its period. For sheer repellence, its libretto, adapted by the composer from Dostoyevsky's like-named novella of social and moral corruption, has few operatic peers. And its theatrical manner is ascetic. Voices raised ecstatically in song? Forget about it. Love duets? Don't be silly. This is an opera peopled by sadists, masochists, narcissists, cynics and hysterics, all wallowing in greed, spite, snobbery and Schadenfreude, all hooked on humiliation and betrayal, to say nothing of the compulsive gambling (Dostoyevsky's own vice) that symbolizes mankind's helplessness before malignant fate. How one longs by the end for Siegfried to swoop down on a vine and smite the lot of them.

But no, Siegfried is dead. No more redeemers. The 20th century had arrived.

Of course, Dostoyevsky was there ahead of time. (''The Gambler'' was published in 1867, the year after ''Crime and Punishment.'') But that is precisely why he had to wait until the 20th century to find an operatic voice: in Prokofiev, in Janacek and so forth. In his recent book about Wagner, Michael Tanner affects a very discerning ''wonder'' at how his hero ''can have lived in the center of the age of the novel, that supreme form of the unheroic, and not shown more suspicion of his characters and the ambience he created for them to live in.'' Just so. Opera took a lot longer to shake off the Romantic trance than literature.

Nineteenth-century operas based on novels -- ''Manon,'' ''Werther,'' ''Eugene Onegin'' -- were anomalies, harbingers of realism. Eighteenth-century forerunners like Piccinni's ''Buona Figliuola'' (after Richardson's ''Pamela'') were invariably comedies. Prokofiev, meanwhile, based five of his seven completed operas on novels; and that was only the beginning of his deheroicizing project, which he saw as opera's only possible salvation.

On his first trip abroad, in 1915, Prokofiev hobnobbed in Paris with Diaghilev and Stravinsky, who assured him that opera was finished, a backwater. (Stravinsky, the son of an opera singer who never appreciated his talent, had his reasons; so did Diaghilev, who could not afford to put on operas in Paris.) The younger man went back to Russia determined to show them. Having picked the least Romantic subject he could think of, he set it according to the precepts of a Russian maverick tradition that had been pioneered in the 1860's in a couple of strange works by Mussorgsky (''Marriage,'' after Gogol) and Aleksandr Dargomyzhsky (''The Stone Guest,'' after Pushkin).

These were not so much operas as ''sung plays'' (to use a handy term coined by Joseph Kerman in ''Opera as Drama''). That is, they were verbatim settings of pre-existing stage dramas, in which the whole idea of dramma per musica -- drama adapted to musical purposes -- was scrapped in the name of ''truth,'' and problems of operatic ''form'' and libretto structure were circumvented. Later examples were Debussy's ''Pelléas et Mélisande,'' Strauss's ''Salome'' and Berg's ''Wozzeck.'' But the Russians were there first, and their example was fresh in Prokofiev's mind, because in 1909 he witnessed the belated premiere of ''Marriage,'' as edited after the composer's death by Rimsky-Korsakov.

Unlike Dargomyzhsky's opera, Mussorgsky's was set to a prose text, and this, too, became an article of faith for Prokofiev. His adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novella amounted in the main to excerpting the lengthy passages in dialogue form and cutting the connecting narrative.

In a couple of incredibly cocky newspaper interviews that the 25-year-old composer gave St. Petersburg reporters while his opera was being rehearsed at the Maryinsky in 1916, he scoffed at every conceivable operatic convention, from the use of rhymed verse for librettos to the unrealistic deployment of the chorus, the casting of voices in combination (ensembles) instead of succession (dialogue) and -- it went without saying -- the chopping of the action into ''numbers.'' He practiced what he preached, too. In the climactic casino scene there are onlookers, but there is no chorus, just a multitude of individual lines for comprimarios. And voices never combine in harmony except when one singer interrupts another, just as stage actors might do.

But although he doggedly confined his vocal writing to what he called the ''declamatory style,'' Prokofiev managed, as his fellow composer Nikolai Miaskovsky wrote in admiration, to ''give music its due.'' Irrepressibly fertile in melody, Prokofiev hung his recitatives on sturdy melodic supports like the big round tune that begins the opera and sustains most of poor Aleksei's futile professions of self-destructive love for the peevish Pauline. Having provided tunes galore but making no concessions to mere singers, Prokofiev confidently predicted that he would achieve a ''scenic flexibility'' and a ''steady dramatic crescendo'' that would rescue opera from its impasse and ensure its survival in the 20th century.

Alas, what a poor prophet he turned out to be -- not about opera itself but about his role in its history. First there was trouble with the Maryinsky singers, who balked at the ''unsingable'' parts the bumptious lad had written for them. The young director Vsevolod Meyerhold took over and promised to whip the cast into line, but then came the revolution. The Maryinsky's chief conductor, the Englishman Albert Coates, went home, and the production was canceled.

Ten years later, Meyerhold and Prokofiev planned another production, in Moscow, but it was stymied by the radical Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians. (Prokofiev should have taken warning from this bellwether of draconian arts policies to come but didn't; it was during yet another aborted collaboration with Prokofiev, on his opera ''Semyon Kotko,'' that Meyerhold was arrested, imprisoned and shot.)

In desperation, Prokofiev gave the ''Gambler'' premiere to the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, which produced it ineffectively in French translation in 1929. The opera then went unheard until after the composer's death. The Bolshoi production that came to the Met in 1975, first performed in Moscow the year before, was in fact the opera's first Russian staging.

The fate of ''The Gambler'' was its composer's fate in a microcosm. Although he thought of himself as an opera composer first and foremost, Prokofiev saw only four of his operas produced. Of the four, only two survived their initial production during his lifetime, and of the two, only one (''The Love for Three Oranges'') really entered the repertory.

As usual in such cases, the victim has been blamed, but never was an operatic career so dogged by adverse circumstances. There have been many signs of late, thanks in large part to the efforts of Mr. Gergiev, who has by now recorded most of his works in the form, that Prokofiev may yet gain the position in the operatic firmament he fiercely believed to be his by right. ''The Gambler'' at the Met could prove to be a step in that direction.